*American Literature in the World Graduate Conference*
*Yale University April 5, 2019*
The conference hopes to broaden the scope of American literature, opening
it to more complex geographies, and to a variety of genres and media. The
impetus comes partly from a survey of what is currently in the field: it is
impossible to read the work of Toni Morrison and Teju Cole, Bei Dao and
Rita Dove, Tony Kushner and Lynn Nottage, Joan Didion and Ta-Nehisi Coates
without seeing that, for all these authors, the reference frame is no
longer simply the United States, but a larger, looser, more contextually
varied set of coordinates, populated by laboring bodies, migrating faiths,
generational sagas, memories of war, as well as the accents of unforgotten
tongues, the taste and smell of beloved foods and spices.
The twenty-first century is a good century to think about American
literature in the world. But other centuries are equally fertile ground, as
the writings of Anne Bradstreet, Phillis Wheatley, Margaret Fuller, Walt
Whitman, Herman Melville, Sui Sin Far, Gertrude Stein, Zitkála-Šá, William
Carlos Williams, Frank O’Hara, Audre Lorde, and Gloria Anzaldúa make
abundantly clear. To study these and countless other authors is to see that
the United States and the world are neither separate nor antithetical, but
part of the same analytic fabric. Our conference explores these extended
networks through many channels: from the cultural archives circulating
across the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans as well as the Caribbean
Sea; to the dynamic interactions between indigenous populations and those
newly arrived; from the institutions of print, to the tangled ecologies of
literature, art, theater, music, and film, to the digital globalism of the
present moment.
The conference is supported by the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript
Library; the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences; the Creative Writing
Program; the English Department; the American Studies Department; and the
African American Studies Department.
Please send a 1-page abstract (250-650 words) to
americanliteratureintheworld@gmail.com by *December 15*.
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